IN the runner-up to Nigeria's government announcement of the controversial removal of subsidy on petroleum products on the New Year day, the former French finance minister and head of the International Monetary Fund, IMF, Mrs Christine Largarde flew into Abuja.
Her mission was ostensibly to shore up the sagging morale of the government officials whose argument for the removal of the subsidy was overwhelmed by the superior arguments that the subsidy it sought to remove is phantom and non-existent.
The argument, later to be justified by the House of Representatives ad-hoc committee that investigated the subsidy payment, was that the problem with the sector is massive corruption perpetrated by highly placed government officials and their cronies. Mrs Largarde visit did bolster the government in its determined folly and it went out and announced a more than hundred per cent rise in the price of petroleum product.
The popular outrage that ensued in the streets forced a modest rethink in government. For more than a decade since the return of civil rule in Nigeria, the Bretton Wood inspired economic policy has held sway.
Imposition of harsh austerity measures, currency devaluation, lay-offs of workers, wage freeze or actual collapse of wages as what is left as wages are eaten up by inflationary pressure and massive capital flights, especially the $12 billion fretted away in a dubious debt repayments.
While these punitive measures are harshly imposed on Nigerians, the government claims there is no other alternative economic measures.
But the victory of the socialist party in France, where its candidate and the president-elect, Mr. François Hollande, made clear that it would abandon orthodox neo-liberal policies and follow more socially- sensitive policies to restore a sense of community wrecked by years of mindless neo-liberalism puts a lie to it. As a first measure, the socialist party promised that it would increase wages and raise corporate tax.
One universal folly of neo-liberalism is, while, company bosses pad their emoluments, including bonuses and other fringe benefits, the workers are laid off and wages are slashed, longer working hours are imposed with more flexible rules that make workers more vulnerable. This elaborate anti-worker platform is routinely described as the necessary structural reforms to stimulate the economy and promote sustainable growth.
It is this fashionable orthodoxy that the French socialist party stood up against and with a resounding endorsement, the French people threw in their support. The president-elect, Mr Hollande, while favourably disposed to the European Union, made clear from the beginning that he is going insist on re-negotiating the fiscal pact which was the sign post of neo-liberal austerity in Europe. The Germans who almost imposed the pact and held it as an article of faith will have to swallow hard and also do the necessary pruning, if the Franco-German motor that drives the European Union would not get knocked.
Germany and France are both first and second largest economy in Europe and fourth and fifth largest in the world, after the United States, China and Japan. And for effect, Mr Hollande, the French president-elect is a core believer in Europe. He cut his political teeth under the tutelage of Mr Jacques Delors, the strategic driver of the European Union as it is, in contemporary times.
Mr Hollande whose core economic programme is to focus on growth, in spite of overwhelming obsession of the governments in the Eurozone with austerity, a measure foisted by outgoing president Nicholas Sarkozy and her ideological soul-mate in Berlin, chancellor Angela Merkel.
The French socialist party unlike the labour party in Britain or the social democratic party in Germany or the Spanish socialist embraces the core value of socialism with elaborate protection for workers and the middle class. While British Labour Party and the German social democratic move to the centre and redesigned themselves as seeking the third way, the French socialist party remain ideological discernible and did not seek re-invention as middle of the ground party. Its grounds of difference on domestic and foreign policy issue with the defeated right wing UMP party of Mr. Sarkozy is as ideologically discernible as the strategy.
In the rest of continental Europe, including Italy with a formerly ideological left party, the socialist parting or parties of the left are dissolved in the neo-liberal world outlook with only a putative difference with the conservative parties on strategies alone. The socialist party in France was clearly an exception to the trend of new neo-liberal convergence, commonly referred to as centrism. The point, been made is that French socialist party won the election on a clear alternative policy and programme, which also offers chances, lessons and opportunities for Africa to re-think the neo-liberal consensus which in the past two decades have left the continent at the miserable bottom of all human index assessment.
In spite of France competitiveness in the neo-liberal economic order, the simple message of the socialist party, which resonated among the French people, is that a sizeable majority are left behind and that undermines the lofty value of fraternity and equality.
While the hate-mongering party, the National Front, founded by former paratrooper, Mr Jean Marie Le-pen and now led by his daughter acknowledges the dire conditions of most French people in the current economic situation, the party's paranoid leads it to blame immigration and minorities.
The socialist party on the hand sees the hard life of the working people in the free roam of capital and the market it manipulates. For the avoidance of doubt, nobody wants a restoration of soviet model of central planning, but it does not take any economic special insight to see that the neo-liberal bull has run its course.
Africa caught largely unprepared in the global transformation of the nearly past two decades have seemed to reincarnate the wretched fate of a salt vendor, whose patrons quickly called in the rain water, soon after he was dispatched. Standing in the angry rain water with a bag of salt, Africa must seek new and imaginative initiatives to move beyond the neo-liberal economic architecture, it has no input in designing or seek accommodation in it, through active participation in re-designing it.
The French socialist party in political wilderness for nearly two decades, has had its message cut out, that the existing economic order do not work for the majority of French people.
For the second time, the socialists are coming to power in France since after the founding of the fifth republic by the ebullient Charles De-Gaulle, the first been the tenure of Francois Mitterrand, France is set for a unique and interesting time, that will reverberate throughout Europe and even raise a modest re-think, in Africa, the hapless thrash-can of the current vicious neo-liberal economic order.
Mr. OCHARLES ONUNAIJU, a journalist, wrote from Abuja.
Vanguard Nigeria